Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday November 26, 2010 @05:58PM
from the for-services-rendered dept.

binstream writes "To support Linux game development, Unigine Corp. announced a competition: it will give a free license for its Unigine engine to a seasoned team willing to work on a native Linux game. The company has been Linux-friendly from the very start; it released advanced GPU benchmarks (Heaven, Tropics, Sanctuary) for Linux before and is working on the OilRush strategy game that supports Linux as well."

We are now entering a transition period when the masses are starting to migrate to low-spec tablet computers from the PCs. The iPads, the new wave of Android tablets and such.. There is no need for the old PC-format packaged computer, the average joe consumer is quicky realizing that fact. The games that need gigs of memory, are CPU/GPU hungry, draw lot of power and require these 3D engines might not be such a hot genre to dive in and develop for right now.

Damn I wish I had mod points. Whiteboy86 seems to just be repeating the standard apple rhetoric. PC gaming is NOT dying. The quality of the games on a phone/tablet is no where near what it is on a PC. Full stop.

Support for the notion that PC gaming is dying: Civilization V, Spore, Supreme Commander 2, Dragon Age 2 (maybe). All dumbed-down versions of their predecessors. The current selection of PC games at retail stores. The trend of UI for PC games. Mandatory online DRM for single player games. Lack of innovation in the past decade/consolidation of genres. Games run like shit even on modern PCs. "Ship now, patch later". Shift towards netbooks/phones/tablets.

Support against the notion that PC gaming is dying: Steam holiday sales (AAA titles for poverty prices), wide-berth of indie games, probably more AAA titles released per year now more than ever, digital downloads, nearly the entire back catalog of PC games available to play (GOG) on modern hardware. Integrated graphics are good enough to play games from several years ago on minimal settings.

Regardless of where you stand on the issue, one thing is for certain: PC gaming is definitely not like it used to be.

Aside from the fact that Apple won't allow Steam on iOS, I fail to see the need. On the PC, Steam was the first good app store. Game developers can use the iTunes App store (and get a better percentage than they do on Steam). On Android, maybe, since Google is pushing free apps with advertising, but the only advantage there would be supporting more countries. What would steam bring over existing app stores? Play and sync Plants vs Zombies on your phone and your pc?

What would steam bring over existing app stores? Play and sync Plants vs Zombies on your phone and your pc?

Buy once, play everywhere? That's better than the iTunes+steam model where you have to buy once for each platform. Of course, iTunes makes more sense than steam since if Apple dies, your iPhone is quickly worthless. If steam somehow dies, your computers still work, but you can't install your software anymore.

Laptops, which are more than capable gaming platforms, won't be going anywhere for a long time. Your iPad or Galaxy might be fun and might be a good substitute for some tasks, but I've yet to meet a single soul who has ditched their main PC for a tablet or smartphone.

And while we're on the subject, tablets aren't exactly "low spec". Compared to the PCs of only a couple of years ago, these tablets can hold their own quite nicely. Maybe PC game devs might be forced to hold back on the bloat a little for the n

What I find curious about the general poverty of the linux gaming scene is how the prerequisite elements that do exist seem to have come together much less well than I would have expected, even as, in other areas, the prerequisite elements come together better than I would expect.

A lot of effort gets dumped into Linux and the software ecosystem that people generally mean when they say "linux"(gnome, KDE, prominent programs for both, etc.) A fair percentage of it is paid for(kernel work that makes it more suitable for vendor X's servers and vendor Y's embedded platforms, some Freedesktop consortium stuff, etc.); but much of it is purely voluntary, even the sort of thing that corporations might shy away from under the advice of their lawyers(swift reverse-engineering of iPod and MTP syncing, that one French physicist who single-handedly built support for about a bazillion pre-UVC webcams, etc.).

Similarly, a lot of purely voluntary effort gets dumped into the modding scene. On occasion, a very prominent and successful mod team gets snapped up and goes pro; but that is a sucker's bet. There is a lot of hard, sometimes tedious, modding/art/game balance work going on around commercial games purely voluntarily.

On the Linux side, support for cutting-edge, just-released games and engines is rather sparse; but there are a number of fully free engines and generic asset packs that have been kicking around for a while. All of ID's older engine properties have been cleaned up and open-ified, some from-scratch engines have as well, as well as a few other scratch developed or commercially abandoned projects.

There exist the engines(not cutting edge; but adequate enough for reasonably pretty graphics), there exists a talent pool, as proven by the modders, and their exists a reasonable amount of volunteerism and paid-for-by-people-unconcerned-by-free-riders paid work in the linux ecosystem generally. Why does that so seldom come together on the Linux side? Are the modding tools with contemporary-release proprietary games just that superior to the tools available to the freed engines? Is the mass of potential gamers to turn into modders just that much larger on Windows? Something else?

It's a catch 22 sort of a situation. Which is why when I buy a game which is available on Mac, PC and Linux that I choose the Linux version or tell them that my main system is Linux.

I have a copy of HoMM3 bought from Loki before they went belly up, unfortunate since the produce was quite well polished and plays just as well as the Windows copy I now own.

More than that though, there's an awful lot of free Linux games out there, and Linux hasn't really drawn enough attention from either games or developers to make it a gaming platform. Crossover Games helps, but it's really not anywhere near good enough. Not to mention that the developer has no way of knowing that it's being played on Linux and that DRM schemes often foil it.

For one most of the people that are paid have employers that want them to focus on specific things, not in detail but I doubt they'd could sit around making games on company time. The other thing is that it's much easier to envision a mod of an existing game than a new game, and on Linux you're mostly talking about a new game. There's few existing communities today. The open source model has proven much more effective when there is a clear rally flag, the way FreeCiv is a clone of civilization.

I think you may have hit the nail on the head. I don't think it's anything like a lack of standards that is keeping there from being more open source Linux games, except good cross-distro installation standards (getting your game recognized by the software manager so you can control it, and even update it, using it), I think it's vision and organisation issues. Conveying one's vision for a game is difficult, and getting several developers to agree and want the same vision is pretty hard too. With somethi

The motivator for (most) people doing creative work is to have people see/experience their work.

You can make a mod for a PC game, which thousands of people share and talk about, or make a game from scratch on Linux, which not only has a significantly smaller audience, but is actually a harder development process (modding on an existing game lets you re-use a *lot* of stuff you'd have to make yourself on Linux.)

Most open source projects are only developed by one person. X.org for example has only 12 main contributors even through it's a 20+ year old project.

This is why open source games never go anywhere because a game needs far more then one person working on it, people quickly get bored due to lack of progress and the project dies. I've seen it over and over again on open source games.

This is a nice gesture but, I don't really see it jump starting linux game development. I don't think linux will be considered a viable gaming market until a gigantic name like Blizzard starts releasing native linux clients. In fact, I think Blizzard could single handedly make linux a gaming platform. They already release OpenGL versions for the Mac so technologically, they are a short hop from a linux client rather than a giant leap. I wonder if thousands of e-mails to release Diablo 3 with a native linux client would be enough to persuade them to do it.

World of Warcraft and many of their games run fine on Wine already. Eve Online officially supported their game in Linux for a while, and that was just Wine + their Client bundled together. If Blizzard officially recognized and supported their clients on Wine, that alone would be a huge win for Linux.

And if Google is really pushing for greater success of Linux, helping advance Wine would help them.

Official Wine support would certainly be a step in the right direction. I played WoW under Wine long ago and I got the impression that while it wasn't officially supported, it wasn't such an unsavory configuration that Blizzard would tell you to bugger off if you asked for support for it. I have no evidence to back this up but, I also got the impression that the desire to play WoW on linux gave the Wine project a very tangible flagship kind of "This Must Work" application. So, while I would love to see native linux clients, official Wine support would still be amazing and, possibly more beneficial to the linux community because of the side effects of having a better Wine.

Official Wine support would certainly be a step in the right direction. I played WoW under Wine long ago and I got the impression that while it wasn't officially supported, it wasn't such an unsavory configuration that Blizzard would tell you to bugger off if you asked for support for it. I have no evidence to back this up but, I also got the impression that the desire to play WoW on linux gave the Wine project a very tangible flagship kind of "This Must Work" application. So, while I would love to see nati

Valve is another company that could do it. Importantly, they're currently porting all their major games to the Mac, which is a very good halfway point for porting to Linux. More importantly, they've been releasing Linux ports of their dedicated server software - no renderer or client software, meaning you can't actually play it, but that means a good chunk of the code is already there. Most importantly, though, Valve is pretty much in control of digital distribution, which is the ONLY way commercial games are going to come to Linux (many shops don't even stock Windows games anymore, let alone Linux) - and their current push onto the Mac is causing other companies to port there as well.

Looking through my current Steam gamelist, I see 20-odd games that already have Linux ports, and another 30 or so that could be ported with less effort than normal. Now, not all of them are guaranteed to get a port - but even if half of them do, that's enough for 35 games on launch day, probably more (I used my "purchased games" list instead of the full "all games on Steam" list). That's enough for a pretty good launch, which would probably push other developers to either release ports, or hire someone to port it.

Performance. On Windows, Direct3D apps are faster. Not by much, but enough to be used. Also, the renderer itself is only a small part of the port. The main thing is optimization - fine-tuning it to run quickly and efficiently.

That brings up an interesting point. If a developer knows they're going to make a Mac port, why in the world do they still write their game in Direct3D first?

It's not an either/or problem. You can easily write your game engine to use either, and it's been done before. (For example, pretty much every game engine that exists ever in the last decade.) That way, you get higher performance on DirectX-supporting machines, and compatibility with more platforms, without having to change your core game code. This is

Except that Blizzard has been releasing Mac games for nearly two decades now. Macs still aren't a real gaming platform. Why would Linux, which has a much smaller piece of the desktop market than Apple, suddenly become a gaming platform when Blizzard releases a game for it? You'd need a serious Linux EXCLUSIVE game to do that, and I don't see that happening.

I'm not really sure how to say this without using stereotypes but, linux users and mac users are generally very different types of people. While the installed user base of OSX is larger than linux, the percentage of hardcore gamers is probably much, much higher on linux. I think when you target OSX for games, you are targeting a platform. If you target linux, you are targeting a demographic: Nerds with copious amounts of free time.

Nonsense. If people were hardcore gamers then they wouldn't be running only Linux in the first place. There are some that run Linux and use games in Wine, but there aren't as many as you make out. Furthermore, those who do are usually savvy enough to get games running in Wine. Most Mac users have a hard time figuring out how to dual boot, and Crossover in OS X has much crappier performance than Wine in Linux. As such, combined with Apple having, at minimum, five times the marketshare as Linux on the desktop

I may not have made my point well but, I think a love of gaming and a curiosity of technology are attributes you'll often find together in a person. I admit that this is again generalizing but, buying a mac is practically a declaration of "I have no interest whatsoever in understanding how my computer works. I just want it to work" (In fact, that's basically what Mac ads say). If a curiosity of technology and gaming go hand in hand (which I think they do), then mac users are the most abysmal gaming marke

I have several friends who are pretty hardcore gamers. None of them are very interested in Linux. Why would they be? Everything they want to play runs fine in Windows. Furthermore, I've seen PLENTY of hardcore gamers who are utterly clueless. Why else would people blow money on Alienware? You are completely mistaken in thinking that hardcore gamers are interested in how a computer works. Most don't really care. They just want the computer to run their games.

That seems a bit disingenuous. There are philosophically crazy open source users and there are practical open source users. The latter almost certainly outweigh the former and they don't mind paying for a game. I've met far, far more "This just works better" linux users than I have "Fuck the man!" linux users.

You do know that the WoW beta included a linux client as well as the windows one yes?

Apparently the official reasons it was dropped for release were 'legal reasons'. Nobody knows if the port is kept up to date, however it is known that one point some of the developers were using the linux build on their own machines.

Blizzard could single handedly make linux a gaming platform. They already release OpenGL versions for the Mac so technologically, they are a short hop from a linux client rather than a giant leap

The Source engine does OpenGL on the Mac now too, so Valve is in the same position. The Steam client partially runs on Linux (natively, that is, not under Wine) too, although Valve is denying there's an actual Linux client for end users now. (Of course, Michael Larabel of Phoronix claims otherwise.)

No it isn't. It's completely self-serving (free publicity) and limited in nature. It costs them nothing to license an engine people weren't going to buy anyways, and get this: The first place team gets to keep using the engine for free for their game, but the runner-ups have to buy the license to keep working on their game:

"The winner team will get a free binary license on Unigine engine for a single project on PC platform (Windows / Linux) with full access to technical support and updates.

I'd rather use alternatives such as Ogre3D [ogre3d.org] or Irrlitch [slashdot.org] even if not technologically advanced. I think that's the best way to support Linux-based game development, the same way Blender3D has been doing with their animated short films. Otherwise I feel the community will gain nothing from this.
You know, what bugs the the most is that even though Unigine is closed sourced, It has never been used in any important industry title, despite being around for years.

Technology wise, Ogre3D is not behind, at least on the 3D engine front. Unigine might offer a few features that fall outside the strict 3D engine category, but I doubt the 3D part is any more advanced than Ogre's. Not being able to fix bugs or customize the engine is a major downside.

Still, it's good that whoever might be using it for a game can now release a linux binary with minimal cost.

If you already have a fairly successful Linux game now, why wouldn't you put in a bid for this? It would take less work for you to port your game than one designed from scratch. And you can prove that you already know how to deliver on the Linux platform.

That being said, shooters come and go. Their are 10 million. Even with shooters being the most popular genre typically, I think a great platform game would be more likely to steal headlines and gain attention.

Heh, I don't know if "everyone" would dive in. There are plenty of good retro games out there that have gone absolutely nowhere. You'd need to serious advertising dollars to have more than a scant chance of real success. Heck, I'm building an old-school party-based RPG (Think Bard's Tale) for Android and iOS once I either learn Cocoa or see if there are any good cross-compilers when I'm done, but I'm not betting on it doing more than making me a few bucks. It's fun to dream, but try to keep your expectation

Here in the Real World (i.e. outside of Slashdot and our parents' basement), sports simulations are the most popular genre of game. I mean, no doubt shooters are popular, but Halo 3 has nothing on Madden.

Actually, that's probably one of Linux's biggest problems in that respect. People are used to getting really good games for free or not being able to have them at all without Wine. It's a tough cycle to break because somebody has to release something in order for it to be bought, and gamers expect to have something to play or they won't ditch Windows.

It's getting a lot better than it used to be, the commercially available Linux games are far better than they used to be in every way.

Yes, cry that someone is trying to help Linux development. Get pissed because they're not doing it in a way that YOU want.

Zealots like you are exactly what is wrong with Linux right now. Linux can be free and open all you want, but when you expect software vendors to strictly do the same and badmouth those who don't, you're driving developers away. Less software = less users, plain and simple.

Yes, cry that someone is trying to help Linux development. Get pissed because they're not doing it in a way that YOU want.

I know it's easy to point out that "but it isn't GPL! waah!" is not exactly a good argument. Obviously.

But I think it'd be much easier to say "but we already have GPL engines! waah! How does this contest inspire us to do something we were already avoiding doing?"

The problem with open source games, or Linux gaming in general, isn't the lack of 3D engines. It's the lack of budget (time, effort, talent?) for creating nice game assets and developing the content. An engine donation isn't going to make the game i

No single drop of rain believes itself to be responsible for the flood. One idiot on./ is nothing. Thousands upon thousands ranting and raving all over the internet? That's a bit different. If someone is interested in developing a commercial game with Linux, don't you think they'll want to check the waters first? And when they see "OMG CLOSED SOURCE FUCK OFF", they'll probably can the idea. It's no secret that a large portion of the Linux desktop userbase thinks like this.

Not of this level of quality. I've checked out many of the GPL engines, and they just aren't up to the level of quality of Unreal Engine 3 or Unigine. There's a lot of things open-source does better, but so far, game engines are not one of them.

I see plenty of free 3D engines around, yes, but most of them are rather inadequate for modern games. And like it or not, there's still quite plenty of gaming companies who prefer closed-source engines.

I'm just saying that I personally do not care if the game is closed or not, or if parts of it are, as long as it looks good, has great gameplay, and is available for Linux. God knows we lack good games.

I don't know if it is the engines so much as the crappy lack of ideas. Look at the list of engines another posters added above, how many are nothing but shitty Q3:Arena clones? On the Cube 2 page I got "We aren't focused on single player, but click here for a bunch making a great single player with our engine" or some such. What do I find on the link? project: dead.

You come up with a kick ass single player with a good story, maybe some nice twist like Bioshock? Folks WILL notice. Crank out the same tired as

why there is even a question of "Why isn't there more gaming on Linux?" Look at how many desktops Linux currently occupies. I don't have the numbers in front of me but it's pretty small compared to Windows and Mac. Now look at how many of those users are going to be interested in playing games. Comparatively, not many. Hell, they already chose a free OS with mostly free apps, why would they pay for a game? The logic may not necessarily hold up, but I can imagine thats how the game companies see it. N

In my opinion, being Linux-friendly *cannot* exclude being Open-Source and GPL-friendly, as these are really the heart and soul of Linux. Releasing a free *license* is not like releasing the source code. This should not be applauded.

Actually, the first step towards good linux drivers is entirely in the dev's hands. No one to blame but the kernel hackers.
Provide a stable interface. Provide a stable binary interface, and the manufacturers will provide drivers, at least for common processors. It really is that simple.
As long as the drivers need to be rewritten every few months because the kernel was changed (often for no other reason than to break compatibility), linux will have crummy drivers. No sane company is going to sign up

For starters, unlike windows land, in linux drivers tend to have common things that many drivers need put into modules and re-used. For example the mac80211 stack. In this example all the actual card drivers have to do is basically tell the kernel where the registers are and what they do and bam, working wifi.

Bug fixes in used modules fix bugs in all things that use it. Code re-use to the extreme.

It also helps with portability, can you run your nvidia binary driver on mips? Hell no, could you run neauvou which exposes the hardware through gallium and uses GEM etc.

As long as the drivers need to be rewritten every few months because the kernel was changed (often for no other reason than to break compatibility), linux will have crummy drivers.

Linux by far has the most in-built driver support of any operating system that has ever existed. To call it crappy is a bit of a farce.

All hardware vendors need to do is give a kernel dev specs and a driver which will be indefinitely supported is created. I can still use a tv tuner card from 2001 on my machine now, could you do the same with windows 7?

Having a stable ABI limits improvements to the kernel, and loses a great deal of flexibility and usefulness. So really, screw that. If you 'want' a stable ABI, it is a good sign you are doing it wrong anyway.

All hardware vendors need to do is give a kernel dev specs and a driver which will be indefinitely supported is created.

Yeah, driver for my Asus WL-167g wifi was created and worked, but now I can't compile it anymore, because someone thought that net_device struct is no longer needed (starting from kernel 2.6.31). Driver is still open source, but I'm not good enough at driver programming so I can't use this with newest kernels. Now imagine normal user, which buys a card which has "Compatible with linux" on

This is a perfect example of why having drivers in the mainline kernel tree are a good idea.

If it was it would get automatic updates as the other parts of the kernel are changed. What tends to happen though when there is an open source driver not in kernel, people study the source and within 3-6 months create an in kernel driver that supports it.

So typical worst case is you are stuck using an old kernel version for maybe a year until the new proper drivers are ready for prime time.

Yes, the political and other agendas that go along with Linux essentially result in it fucking itself over in this respect.

It also helps with portability, can you run your nvidia binary driver on mips?

So who REALLY do you expect to care that you can't run it on a reasonable obscure OS... with a rather obscure (these days) processor? You might care, and maybe some guy in Europe... but no one else does, so you're not really doing anything to help your argument

Actually I'm using it to capture the composite output of various consoles. But you missed the point, this is one example of many I can give.

The fact that you think this way shows that you have no concept of how proper software development works. Its not even unique to software development, standardized interfaces are considered one of the major innovations that brought us to where we are today as far as production is concerned.

Standardised interfaces are a great thing for enabling functionality between discrete projects. Remember that this is the kernels INTERNAL functions we are talking about.. You would essentially be mandating the codebase to freeze.

I think it has been well and truly established that having a release every few years as opposed to consistent incremental improvements is a ba

Please hell no. If windows is an example of doing this right then I don't want it. The ABI for windows hasn't changed in 20 years and it's horrible riddled with bugs and simply a PoS. All one has to do is look at how lame their visual c++ compiler is because it has to compile down for their archaic abi to realise that's not the way to go.

The ABI generally maintains backwards compatibility to a good extent, but if you think it hasn't changed you're completely ignorant and blind.

If it hasn't changed... why do drivers designed for Win7 not work in XP or Win3.1? How do applications now take advantage of more than 640k? How do these Windows apps interact with the new security bits of Windows 7. Why did AV makers shout and scream about the changes made that screwed over their 'ability' to provide vi

> Provide a stable binary interface, and the manufacturers will provide drivers, at least for common processors.

Are you sure it's all about binary interfaces? Hardware vendors lose control of whatever runs under linux, while a slightly incompatible windows release/service pack every now and then ensures forced obsolescence.

That would change a bit with binary interfaces but not that much.And it would get in the way of kernel development.

Here NVIDIAs (you know, those who actually do the drivers) opinion on the topic:

The lack of a stable API in the Linux kernel. This is not a large obstacle for us, though: the kernel interface layer of the NVIDIA kernel module is distributed as source code, and compiled at install time for the version and configuration of the kernel in use. This requires occasional maintenance to update for new kernel interface changes, but generally is not too much work.

To those marking the parent as insightful, I'd like to see one single link that backs up what he says about video cards being "just framebuffers" under Linux. You realize that most of the OpenGL driver code is shared with the Windows implementations (which is why Heaven pretty much has the same framerates in both OSes), right?

Hell no. Think about the differences in the ways you do (or better to say, fake) lighting and shadows - whether your "polygon" is static or not makes HUGE difference. It's like saying "vehicle is vehicle, no matter how it gets propelled. Rockets require a bit more fuel and different controls than cars, but that's about it".

It sure looks great, I especially loved how the shadows worked realistically when interacting with water.

As for performance: I ran the demo in benchmark mode in Windows 7 using both DX10 and OpenGL, and in Ubuntu 10.10 using OpenGL, and I got the same numbers. Of course since the demo is rather limited it doesn't reflect the full picture of how a game would run, but what it does do is show that Linux is perfectly capable of running a good-looking, modern graphics demo just as well as Win7 at the same speed.

I use Unigine on Linux at work. Everybody else uses it on Windows. OpenGL performance is slightly faster on Linux than Windows but DirectX11 runs a bit faster than OpenGL/Linux I think this is down to DirectX11 multi-threading better thus the CPU becoming less of a bottleneck.This is with the nVidia drivers.

Unigine is really targeted at DirectX10+ class hardware and is one of the first engines to support new DirectX11/OpenGL 4 features. Our most recent project involves perhaps 100kms of Railway track with a

now if video cards run under linux were more than just framebuffers we might go someplace.

Linux already had pretty solid 3D support going all the way back to the Vodoo1 days. Yeah, sometimes you needed to take a little care to buy a card that actually worked in Linux and not just the next best random piece of junk, but that isn't really that that much different from Windows where when you don't take care you might be stuck with some unusable on-board graphics solution.

If 3D hardware would be the problem of Linux gaming, it would have been solved ages ago.

Overall problem with accelerator card support in Linux is that it's several layers "thicker" than in Windows, and those layers tend to be uncontrollable by neither user nor even developer. E.g.

you can't (couldn't?) have stable binary format for GLSL shaders, you have to compile them on the fly (which is insane, because this means that you can't do stuff they do in Windows, where all shader combinations may take hours of offline compiling)

now if video cards run under linux were more than just framebuffers we might go someplace.

Linux already had pretty solid 3D support going all the way back to the Vodoo1 days. Yeah, sometimes you needed to take a little care to buy a card that actually worked in Linux and not just the next best random piece of junk, but that isn't really that that much different from Windows where when you don't take care you might be stuck with some unusable on-board graphics solution.....

Well, given that ATI and Nvidia make the only video cards that can go faster than 20 FPS It is even easier since ATI's 3-d support has never worked in their proprietary driver..

I'm guessing it's to get word out. But more than that I suspect that they're hoping that by giving out the engine that it will help a community develop from which developers can recruit the talent. Talent that's used to working with their engine. Probably not a bad idea.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out, but it definitely could work. The downside is that since only the winner gets a free license, I'm interested to know how many people are going to be willing to work on that, knowing that t